Caucus Cash Comes Late and Fast

Iowa stations are finally seeing the political spending, reports the Washington Post, with the bulk of the candidate cash coming in the last two weeks of December.

The pattern–action around the August straw poll, more in late November, then the late December deluge–caught station sales managers off guard. Reports WaPo:

 ”We were way off on our projections when the month started,” said Russell Hamilton, the manager of ABC affiliate WOI.

He described how his ad teams waited, and waited some more. Hamilton looked at his ledgers at the beginning of December and couldn’t believe his eyes. “We were all dumbfounded,” he said. “I’ve been in this a long number of years, and we were like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ ”

The fourth quarter brought in close to $3.5 million for what the Washington Post calls the state’s two top stations, WHO and KCCI.

We’ll check in with the Iowa stations in a bit to see how the caucus coverage, and caucus cash, is progressing.